


What's in a Name?

by ALC_Punk



Category: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-20
Updated: 2009-05-20
Packaged: 2017-11-27 01:16:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/656408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ALC_Punk/pseuds/ALC_Punk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At five, destiny sounds like something really cool. Kate Brewster learns the truth about how sometimes, destiny is all in a name.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What's in a Name?

At five, destiny sounds like something really cool. You hear about how Robin Hood was destined to give to the poor and steal from the rich, King Arthur and Guinevere. You play Maid Marian and fire plastic-foam-tipped arrows at Howard Roberts from down the block, laughing when Howie cries because you missed that last time and knocked his forehead instead of the apple on his head.

Your mother just smiles in amusement, and tells you that sometimes, Marian had to be a lady as well as an able bowman. 

At eight, when you're Guinevere, you run down the slides, swinging the fake sword your aunt gave you on your birthday. It's pink with sparkles and it's really not meant to be used to attack trees, but you do it anyway. 

School changes you. Girls don't fight. Girls gossip and get chased by boys.

At eleven, you think it's all stupid, but you're not a child anymore. You shout that at your parents at least once a week, trying to keep ahead of your best friend, Bethany Carver, who claims her parents want to lock her in a basement until she's thirty. 

Destiny, you laugh off, beause destiny is for children and fairy stories. You're neither. 

The pink sword of Guinevere was lost long ago.

At fifteen, you kiss a boy for the first time and wonder what all the fuss was about.

You're pretty, and you know it. And you try not to care, but you like the attention. In the back of your mind is that old dream about doing something with your life. That's why you take AP Biology, and when the boys laugh at you, you stomp them into the ground with your brains.

Pretty is nice. Being number one is better. 

At seventeen, you get accepted to medical school. Your parents are so proud and your mother talks of you being a doctor, and raking in the dough (it's a joke, but she respects money--everyone respects money). 

But it's not people you want to treat. You apply for pre-med and pre-vet, and get into both. Dropping the pre-med is easier when you don't have your parents there to disapprove. 

When they find out, your mother cries about lost opportunities, but your dad... He looks proud, still. Especially when you talk about how animals are neglected with such passion that he has to believe.

At twenty-one, you've had more than your share of boyfriends, but studying was always more important. Graduating top of your class gets you into a first-class program, and you've already got an internship lined up for your second year. 

You think of it as your destiny, helping animals, making small children happy and adults relieved. 

At twenty-three, you get engaged. He's beautiful and he thinks your brain is incredible, an he doesn't mind that sometimes you work more hours than he does.

You're happy, you're fulfilled, you're living the American Dream, just like everyone else. 

At twenty-four, the world ends.

He tells you about it, the machine that looks like a man. Some part of you rebels: he's not a man, never will be a man, and there's something terribly wrong about factual accounts of the destruction of mankind. 

It's your destiny, he tells you. You're a leader of the resistance, you and your husband. 

Not the man you're engaged to. 

But some of the members of the resistance that he knows are killed. Their names are seared into your brain long after the bombs fall, long after you and John have sex for the first time. 

It's not hard to find replacements, men and women who have that knack of staying alive. It's harder to convince them to change their names, to call themselves something they were never born with. You don't explain why, even as the resistance and its reputation begins to spread. Their (wrong) names filter out, becoming part of the great machine of destiny. 

At thirty, you know destiny is a crock as you hold John Connor's lifeless body in yours. The machine had lied, you think. Until you remember how you've already shaped others' destinies.

It's hard to hide John's death. Those who know him best know something is up.

You wait until you spot a likely replacement before telling them.

You try not to wince at the horror in their eyes, even as you know now that it was never your John that made the resistance successful. 

He doesn't understand much, but it doesn't matter. War has already made him hard, and his friend, Kyle, seems to think it's a good plan. Kyle, too, you know, and you watch him, knowing he needs to go back soon. 

At thirty-two, you hide out in a bunker, while Kyle Reese travels back in time to save Sarah Connor's life. It's already happened, you know it was a success. Still, you wonder if it was wise to continue to create history. Would Sarah Connor understand, you wonder?

Sometimes, you feel closer to a dead woman than you do to the man impersonating her son (and you wonder if John would have understood, when it's three a.m., and you remember joking with him under cover of darkness about children, something neither of you really wanted). 

Destiny. She would understand it, or maybe she'd want to kill you where you stand.

At thirty-five, it happens again. John's blood on your hands, and you pretend and lie and cheat until another man takes his palce.

It's harder to get people to respect him, but you both work at it. You let him share your bed, because he's supposed to, but you resent him, sometimes. 

The necessity of having a figurehead precludes ease in destroying hope for the resistance. And that is more important than whether one man leaves you cold. Though you share the bed less and less, assigning yourself scout duties and recon missions until you come to terms with the grief you still feel.

It doesn't make it easier, and it happens twice more over the next two decades. 

Neither time is truly memorable, though the resistance has begun to understand what you're doing. No one thinks it's a good plan, but it's what you have. 

At fifty-nine, you know what to do. You've been waiting for this day since you were trapped in a stuffy RV with a machine telling you that you would become the wife of the man who led the resistance against the machines. 

It's so easy to program him, making him forget the face of the man he killed, and substituting another. One you've almost forgotten. 

You send him back to stop the past, or save the future, depending on whose asking. And then you lie again.

John went with him, you tell people, the body on your floor too charred for recognition. He'll be back. 

Destiny, you think, as the machines find the hive and kill too many, is for losers and those who haven't seen hell. 

You're one of the four that survive, and you take them to the southern hemisphere, searching for more survivors, rebuilding the resistance as you go. In what was Florida, you find a dark-haired man with charisma. 

There's something about him that lets him get under your skin, mouth hot on yours until you're writhing beneath him. Sex was something you'd missed, and you cry out for a man you don't remember anymore. Afterwards, draped against his side, you tell him he needs to change his name.

Someday, you wonder if you'll be buried with your real name, or if Kate Brewster will live to be a hundred without you.


End file.
